Senate Choice: Folksy Centrist Born to Politics

Kirsten E. Gillibrand meeting with farmers in 2007 at Tiashoke Farms in Cambridge, N.Y. Credit
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

She would seem the longest of long shots, this young, centrist Democrat from rural upstate New York who was just re-elected to her second term in Congress and is now inheriting the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a 42-year-old lawyer, is to politics born and bred, a relentless campaigner and fund-raiser, a competitive woman whose friends, unprompted, suggest she might someday soon seek the presidency.

As he officially appointed her at noon on Friday after a tortured two-month selection process, Gov. David A. Paterson said of Ms. Gillibrand, “I believe I have found the best person.”

She won her first elected position in 2006, defeating a four-term incumbent in a traditionally Republican district that extends from the Hudson Valley flatlands to the mountainous North Country. Then, adopting the Charles E. Schumer permanent campaign-style of politicking, Ms. Gillibrand (pronounced JILL-uh-brand) became a ubiquitous and studiously folksy presence at malls and county fairs, racked up $4.6 million in donations — much of it from corporate political action committees — and swept 65 percent of the vote this fall.

In Washington, the new Democratic majority handed her two plum committee assignments, Agriculture and Armed Services, and she has a political portfolio not easily charted along a left-right axis. She earned a 100 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association while also being showered with love and dollars by women’s groups like Emily’s List; she favors the English language-only movement as well as abortion rights; she voted in July 2007 to withdraw troops from Iraq and, this fall, against the Wall Street bailout bill.

Ms. Gillibrand’s political education took shape around her childhood dinner table. Her father, Douglas P. Rutnik, is a prominent state lobbyist who once dated Zenia Mucha, a senior aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki. Her grandmother Polly Noonan played a sophisticated brand of machine politics as a close adviser to the legendary Erastus Corning, mayor of Albany; Ms. Gillibrand has described licking stamps for campaign fliers as a child and listening to all that delicious political talk.

“What I admired so much about her was her passion,” Ms. Gillibrand said in a stemwinder of a speech Friday thanking political mentors as well as her husband, parents, grandparents, siblings, children and local supporters — many of them by name. “I thought, ‘Someday I may serve, someday I may be part of this.’ ”

In a way, Ms. Gillibrand began running as far back as the late 1990s, carefully piling up chits, according to Sarah Hoit, a friend from Dartmouth College who worked in the White House at the time. “She came to me and said, ‘Hey, I’d really like to run for political office.’ ” Ms. Hoit said. “We started giving her some political contacts.”

Ms. Hoit added: “She is a very careful planner.”

Within a year, she was serving as special counsel for the housing and urban development secretary, Andrew M. Cuomo.

Her mentors are influential and hail from both sides of the political aisle, to an extent that can set Democrats to twitching. She spent college summers as an intern for former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, a Republican who somehow secured the spot above Ms. Gillibrand’s right shoulder among a sea of Democrats at Friday’s announcement. She was a law clerk for a Reagan-appointed conservative federal appellate court judge, Roger J. Miner, who, with his wife, remains among her political backers. And she ardently pursued and gained the support of Mrs. Clinton, whom she supported in the Democratic presidential primaries last year.

Democrats tend to cut her much slack, because she represents a white, traditionally Republican district that curls around Albany. Their hope — and from some downstate Democrats on Friday, it sounded more like a prayer — is that Ms. Gillibrand will shift left now that she has vaulted to statewide office and needs to cultivate New York City’s black, Hispanic and labor leaders.

“She is on the right-wing of our Congressional delegation,” said Danny Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, an influential third-party group in New York. “People change, and we’re going to be optimistic and hope she does too.”

(Some already detect a bit of a shift: Though Ms. Gillibrand accumulated an 80 percent vote rating from a gay-rights group — the lowest in New York’s Democratic delegation — the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda said she had called him Thursday night and pledged her support for gay marriage.)

Ms. Gillibrand is indisputably intense; a rising corporate lawyer before entering Congress, she worked until the day before she gave birth to her first son, Theodore, now 5 (and received a standing ovation on the floor of the House when she did the same before the birth of her second son, Henry, who is now 8 months old). But she can project a wide-eyed, from-the-farm belt style, one much on display at the Friday’s news conference in Albany, where she alternated odes to motherhood with near-scholarly disquisitions on her opposition to the Wall Street bailout.

As political theater, her style is most effective with the public but sometimes grates on Democratic elders.

During the 2006 election, the Democratic establishment found itself momentarily mute when confronted with reports that Alan G. Hevesi, the state comptroller, might have broken the law by having state employees chauffeur his wife. From anonymous Assembly candidates to Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general and running for governor, Democrats danced away from criticism of their influential colleague.

But Ms. Gillibrand, when asked her opinion, did not mince words. Mr. Hevesi, she told reporters, should resign.

“People were taken aback,” said one former campaign aide who did not want to be identified for fear of being seen as betraying her confidence. “But in retrospect, she made the right call and it was from the gut.”

A year later, she dueled with Mr. Spitzer over his proposed deep cuts in state aid to hospitals. Ms. Gillibrand publicly knocked his proposal, and the state health care union featured her comments prominently in an anti-Spitzer leaflet. The governor, who rarely suffered opponents in silence, dialed her cellphone as she prepared to attend a rally protesting the cuts.

Photo

Representative Kirsten Gillibrand in her office on Capitol Hill in March 2007.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

At a high decibel level, he suggested she not go.

“Kirsten was shaken,” recalled an aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive intra-party nature of the dispute. “She was a new congresswoman being confronted by a governor at the height of his popularity.”

In Washington, Ms. Gillibrand has made a calling card of transparency, posting a “Sunlight Report” on her Congressional Web site that lists her meetings with lobbyists as well as the names of those seeking government grants known as earmarks. Some senior colleagues, in a club where such names are often considered state secrets, complain that this tended to make them look bad.

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More broadly, Ms. Gillibrand sometimes skirts the edge of bad feelings with many in her Democratic Caucus. As a member from a crucial swing district that had remained in Republican hands for decades, she is treated like something of a favored child; former President Bill Clinton, Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama all campaigned for her last year.

And the Democratic leadership often grants her dispensation to vote against their majority to keep favor with her more conservative constituents: She has supported balanced budget amendments, opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants and voted against withholding funds to prosecute the war in Iraq.

When she opposed the bailout bill, however, despite having received bushels of campaign contributions from Wall Street, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grew angry. And while Ms. Gillibrand seems to enjoy close relations with Representative Nita M. Lowey of Westchester County — Ms. Lowey and Ms. Gillbrand swapped effusive compliments at Friday’s news conference— she is not nearly so close to most downstate Democrats.

“They don’t know her well and they don’t care for what they do know,” confided a Democratic political consultant who works with New York City-based lawmakers.

It is easy enough now to divine a straight line for Ms. Gillibrand, from Dartmouth and U.C.L.A. Law School to Congress and beyond. But her political rise was more unexpected, and jagged, than that suggests.

She grew up in the Albany area and attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., a women’s high school. At Dartmouth, she was known as Tina Rutnik and was a boisterous presence who majored in Asian studies and joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.

“We were a house of women, and she and I played a great tennis game, but I don’t recall her wanting to run for office then,” Ms. Hoit, her friend from Dartmouth, said.

She learned to speak and write Chinese before spending a semester in China, and wrote a senior project titled “The History of Tibetan Resistance to the Chinese Occupation of Tibet 1950-1988.”

As part of her studies, she and her mother visited the Dalai Lama’s house while traveling in India. The Albany Times Union reported in 2006 that mother and daughter paid to support the education of a Tibetan boy.

Ms. Gillibrand later interned at the United Nations Crime Prevention branch in Vienna.

She passed her post-law school years largely in New York, as she sandwiched work for two prominent law firms around her stint as special counsel at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Her husband, Jonathan Gillibrand, is a British national who works in finance.

Most recently, she worked for the law firm of David Boies, a prominent liberal litigator who represented Vice President Al Gore in challenging the 2000 election. (Ms. Gillibrand helped represent Altria, the parent company of the Philip Morris tobacco company. Some of her campaign contributors came from these companies, a fact raised by her Republican opponents in her Congressional races).

In 2006, Ms. Gillibrand embarked on what seemed to friends a Don Quixote-like tilt at a Republican powerhouse, Representative John E. Sweeney. The Republicans unleashed barrages, attacking her as “more familiar with the price of dog-walkers in Manhattan than the price of a six-pack at Stewart’s.” Ten weeks out, polls showed her trailing by 19 points.

But she is ever a disciplined candidate. She repeated a message that could be distilled in five words: Bush, Iraq, time for change.

Less than a week before Election Day, a document was leaked to newspapers showing a 911 report stating that the congressman’s wife had claimed he was “knocking her around the house.”

Ms. Gillibrand has declined to say whether her campaign had a hand in the release of that report. She won by 6 points.

Since, she has scarcely stopped raising money — or shied from asking. Her use of a Dartmouth alumni list to collect contributions has occasionally annoyed fellow alums. She campaigns, a Republican consultant observed admiringly, like defeat beckons.

The day after her 2008 win, her campaign Web site prominently posted this headline from a local newspaper: “Gilibrand’s Stature Likely to Rise After Win.” The article contained this quote from Larry Bulman, Saratoga County Democratic Committee chairman: “I could see her potentially running for U.S. Senate.”

Ms. Gillibrand’s friends, who have raised bundles cash for her over the years, go further.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this carried her even higher onto a national platform,” said John Replogle, a Dartmouth classmate who is chief executive of Burt’s Bees, the natural cosmetics company. “I could see her in the cabinet, indeed if not throwing her hat into the ring in eight years.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Senate Choice: Folksy Centrist Born to Politics. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe